Eight must-see films to understand the drama of being stranded in space

“I left Earth in 1983, my fingers groping for galaxies, my reddened eyes fixed on the void and a thousand stars to be explored. Someone help me, I’m falling to the sky and to the Earth. It’s so dark around, there’s no life, there’s no hope, there’s no sound. No chance of ever seeing my home again.” In 1970, the band Van der Graaf Generator put music and lyrics to stellar drift, in the song Pionners Over Cfrom his album H to he, who am the only.

Peter Hammill’s guttural voice appeared languidly over an abysmal background of keyboards and bass to describe the anguish of a galaxy explorer abandoned to his fate in the infinity of the cosmos.

A year earlier, astronaut Neil Armstrong had stepped on the Moon and, for the first time in his history, the human being looked towards the stars and he wondered how powerful the feeling of loneliness could be up there.

Now that the two astronauts of the International Space Station, Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, They see their return to our planet delayed eight months due to technical problems in the Starliner capsule, we review how cinema portrayed the melancholy and despair that usually take over the mind and heart when we get lost between the spheres.

Until this film, the imagination of space travel had been covered by George Pal’s fantastic and multicolored toy store. The influence of this cinematographic multi-instrumentalist (director, photographer and pioneer of special effects in the seventh art) was felt in every frame of Destined for the Moon (1950, Irving Pichel) and sowed the terrain a little innocent on which Kubrick was going to build – with all the seriousness in the world – his famous and problematic monolith surrounded by primates.

The leap in technical quality was accompanied by an adult, solemn and founding theme of the space opera -courtesy of the author Arthur C. Clarke- that the future director of A Clockwork Orange became an existential odyssey between the Earth’s satellite and Jupiter.

Kind of Oedipus with spaceships, religious mysticism and phallic symbols everywhere, 2001 puts on screen the regression of an astronaut to his native home; an inner journey that requires him to cross outer space to have his childhood before his eyes again, sitting alone, sad and abandoned in a Louis XVI-style bedroom that floats between the confines of the galaxy.

Nobody hears the long-suffering Lieutenant Ellen Ripley scream in space – whom the juicy economic fruits of the franchise did not even let “die” in peace in the fourth and extremely unsuccessful part of the saga – who through the sinister corridors of the Nostromo He has to deal again and again with the xenomorph that reproduces like a parasite inside human beings and has acid for blood.

Ridley Scott had just filmed what is probably the best debut feature in the history of cinema (The duelists) when completely changed register and he went from painting the Napoleonic wars to immersing himself in galactic explorations intruded by monsters.

By the time Ripley is left alone on the ship with only the creature for company, the viewer is already transported to a specific dimension of abandonment and drift which is built, almost exclusively, with the use of the silence that reigns between the interstellar abysses.

“Houston, we have a problem.” A defective wire cuts short the thirteenth American lunar mission, and from there the great director Ron Howard draws a tense and millimeter melodrama that goes back and forth between two rooms: the gigantic NASA control room in Houston, Texas, packed with technicians, engineers and specialists trying to solve each of the problems that arise to bring back the suffering cosmonauts – with a memorable Ed Harris in the role of the tactical chief of the mission – and a space module that is left without a prize and adrift, and in whose narrow interior three human beings help each other, fight and help each other again once again so that all the prophecies linked to the fateful number in the title do not come true. Even 300,000 kilometers away from planet Earth.

(1997, Paul W.S. Anderson)

The ship Event Horizon It mysteriously disappears on its way to Neptune and reappears (even more mysteriously) after seven years. The rescue mission aboard the Lewis & Clark transporter must address it in deep space and find out where he was during that long absencesomething that seems to be a bad idea from the precise moment in which those in charge of the rescue – among whom is the engineer who built the lost ship – begin to fear that the place where the Horizon All that time passed could turn out to be hell itself, which would not be so far down, as we like to think, but up there, passing the farthest planet in the Solar System.

Underrated at the time, Paul Anderson’s film It acquired cult status through the years. Its geometric production design and the logic of a spaceship converted into a serial killer were, at the time of its release, an original bet launched against the margins of a genre that already seemed exhausted by successive imitations of Alien.

(2002, Steven Soderbergh)

The Solaris by Soderbergh is not a remake of the film of the same name that Andrei Tarkovski filmed in 1972, but rather a new version of the novel by Stanislav Lem on which it was based.

It is worth clarifying this because the viewer will not find a rereading of the Russian director’s philosophical and transcendentalist disquisitions, but rather a minimalist film of a neutral narrative tonein which psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) has to travel to the Prometheus space station to investigate the orbit of the planet Solaris where, apparently, the dead come back to life.

As a staging of the process of a “duel” in spaceSoderbergh’s version is, at times, even more subtle and elegiac than Tarkovsky’s.

When Kelvin encounters the spirit of his wife who died (suicidal) some time ago, only the stars come to witness the sadness of that man bitten by guilt, who may not be able to stop dreaming about the love of his life among the lights of a planet as beautiful and mysterious as a crystal ball filled with all the colors of the Universe.

Duncan Jones (the son of musician David Bowie) puts Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) on the moon in the shoes of a tormented working class hero bored with his job as a space miner.

But shortly after concluding the three-year employment contract that has taken him this far, Bell begins to suspect that his work has other edges, nooks and angles, and that the loneliness in which they have spent those long and sacrificial three years work may be related to much deeper aspects and corners of your own existence.

In that sense, the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System can hide secrets as inscrutable as that “dark night of the soul” about which Saint John of the Cross wrote, and that demand the most absolute asceticism to be revealed and heard.

The interiors of Claire Denis’ spaceship look dirty and untidy, perhaps because it is a galactic prison inhabited by inmates who have been promised commuted sentences in exchange for risk your neck on a suicide mission (a bit like what happened with The Twelve of the Gallowsby Robert Aldrich). Only here the token of exchange does not consist of fighting against the Nazis, but of offering one’s body – and mind – in the most risky of interstellar missions ever undertaken: the exploration of a black hole.

Robert Pattinson as an interplanetary vampire and Juliette Binoche as a scientist with strange ideas about conception and sexuality They are part of that crew dedicated to routines of recycling and time consumption that, little by little, give way to ceremonies of claustrophobia, cannibalism and violence so dear to the cinema of one of the most creative and unpredictable directors of contemporary cinema.

Here, between David Cronenberg and Philip K. Dick (or with the taste for the viscosities of the body of the first and the explosive paranoia of the second), Claire Denis manages to capture a nightmare furnished with various anguish and traumas, as dry and inhospitable as those extinct stars towards which the ship is heading, and from which not even light can escape.

A reckoning between father and son, settled over several decades and between storms of cosmic energy, lunar pirates and astronautical missions. Roy (Brad Pitt) leaves on a ship in search of his father (Tommy Lee Jones), another lost traveler in space and whose fury can literally destroy our planet.

The generational conflict ends in Neptune, between speculations about the existence or not of intelligent life on other planets and conversations about vocations and family ties that, more than once, they need this type of separation to rethink and heal.

The usual dark and “Shakespearean” tone of Gray’s films, with those torn apart clans and their intense moments of atonementleaves our orbit with the constancy of a comet.

Greek tragedy light years away a strange and meticulous film that requires all the time in the world to be appreciated in its proper measure.